A Letter From Trump’s America

The e-mail below just came in. I’m not going to use the reader’s name or geographical location, and have altered slightly a couple of lines, to protect the reader’s privacy:

I hardly know why I am writing to you except that I think you’re a good listener. You treat your readers very kindly. And on the internet to boot!

War is coming and Trump is one of the first indicators from our side.

I am 31 years old. My [spouse] and I are teachers. When we started down south nine years ago, our school district proudly provided insurance that cost us $0 a month. We had to move north to find a better situation after 2014 when our district moved to a high-deductible HSA that was going to bankrupt us if we were unfortunate enough to have to use it. The birth of our first daughter, born in 2010, cost roughly $500 in hospital bills. Our youngest, in 2013 and with a much more costly and garbage insurance, cost over $5,000. The difference a few years can make!

[In my new job,] we started the school year off with a foster child student, new to the district, causing mayhem. He assaulted over 10 adults in his first week at school. He cussed, spit, bit, hit, ran, and intimidated every single person in the school. I was called in on the second day of school to help move him from one room to another after a violent outburst. When he attempted to assault me, I restrained him. I was informed not to do that anymore. I told them not to call me anymore to help.

He eventually received a one-on-one teacher who he abused every day, as well as his very own classroom. He was formally disciplined one time, with one day of out-of-school suspension when he harmed another child. This went on for near a month and a half, until he was committed to a psych hospital by an outside doctor. Insanity. All of it!

He was in the first grade.

I would imagine all of Trump’s supporters have similar nasty experiences they can point to. Where the world feels like it is coming to pieces in front of them for no good reason. And then there are the obvious, big picture disasters. Government is broken and openly hates on folks. The Church abuses children and covers it up. The media lies and ruins the lives of decent people. Police are murdered in the street. Jihad is here. The White House is lit up in rainbow colors. We invite the Third World. Vets die waiting for care.

My grand-dad was a prick. But he helped win a world war, raised nine children, walked tall, and got things done. He would have loved Trump.

Here is a man who is talking to us in a language we used to speak ourselves. Since when do men have to wrap their speech and beliefs in velvet? Why can’t a sledgehammer be used when a sledgehammer is needed? After eight years of being put down and told we are what is wrong with America, why can’t we get behind someone like Trump? Someone who is not at all afraid to mix it up!

UPDATE: Here’s a portion of a comment from a reader, who details the social fragmentation in his own rural community, and concludes:

That being said — and to add to your correspondent’s story and point — how could these people not vote for Trump? The bewilderment and anger each of those three generations feel — justifiably! — makes them perfect Trump voters. For Generation 1, he promises to make America great again — like they remember. For Generation 2, he tells them that yes, they are right — they have been screwed at every turn, lied to, and he’s going to take care of those folks in Movement Conservatism who did it.

And for Generation 3 — from their perspective (or I should say “our”) — why not? What would Trump wreck that we don’t already see as hopelessly broken? Here in rural America, the old systems and life patterns — sending kids to school, buying a home, participating in a community, supporting a church — just don’t work anymore. Most things new things that hold promise — relocalized agriculture, renewed religious life, schools independent from the failing public system — almost REQUIRE a great deal of the old governmental or social infrastructure be torn down and built anew.

That which is falling ought to be pushed, right?

So I say, Mr. Trump, bring it on. Knock down some barriers, break a few windows. Many of us here in flyover country are praying for just that, in the hopes that a little light and fresh air can start to seep back into the room.

I had the strangest thought last night. After I wrote this post and scheduled it to publish this morning, I settled in to watch a forthcoming documentary about Wendell Berry. I know the director somewhat, and she sent me a copy. It’s an extraordinary film, and I will be writing more about it here when I get the OK from her. At one point, not far into the movie, I picked up my Benedict Option project notebook and started making notes, because there’s so much relevant material in the Berry doc.

I don’t want to say too much about the film now, because I’m not sure to what extent I’m at liberty to comment on it, but I can say that it sheds a surprising degree of light onto the current political moment. Berry has spent a lifetime writing about agriculture and culture, and how the industrial way of growing food has wrought all kinds of harm, in large part because it only sees quantity, not quality. And by “quality,” he means things like the culture that emerges out of traditional farming, and the community cohesion and purpose that traditional farming communities experience, for natural reasons. Most of that is gone now in these places. Berry says that when we work against nature, and the natural order, instead of with it, we are bound to pay a big price. The economic order built around choice, with no regard to what is chosen, imposes real social costs. (And, I would say, the social and cultural order built around choice, though that’s not explicitly a theme in this movie.)

This is Wendell Berry 101. The film shows us older Kentucky farmers talking about what they and their communities have lost — dying towns, for example — and how the system — big agribusiness, the banks, etc. — is stacked against them.

Toward the end of the film, a bizarre thought occurred to me: Donald J. Trump, who is probably the least Berryan figure in the country, is the only one of the GOP candidates who is talking to and for Republican voters who are living in the maelstrom. Don’t misunderstand me: Trump is absolutely not the standard-bearer of Berryan politics! (And that’s the understatement of the year.) But how incredibly weird is it that in 2016, the candidate that speaks most to the condition of those conservatives displaced by the economics and the wars of the Establishment is the loudmouth New York billionaire? Whether or not he has solutions to their condition is a secondary issue. He’s the one who sees, or who at least intuits, that something very wrong has happened, and that the neoliberal order built by the Republican and Democratic Establishment has broken some fundamental things.

The foremost task of conservative political forces is to maintain legitimacy for the state and to carefully guard the surplus within that great invisible treasury of goodwill in their societies. That means finding ways of balancing the interests of different actors, classes, and types in society, whose unchecked actions would otherwise tear the nation apart. The tenets of Manchester liberalism were adopted by conservatives in America because they found them well-suited to an Anglo-Protestant people with a wide distribution of property and a continent of resources. They are not divine writ, though I happily admit that they have been successful because they align with something in our nature and history. Still, we may need to make different exceptions to them than we have in the past.

But if the libertarian prophecies of an American society without a middle class comes true, and 80 percent of resources will ineluctably accrue to the top 20 percent, then the American polity will find itself in danger very quickly of something much worse than Trumpism. The combination of an anti-statist ideology inherited from the Cold War, and a natural inclination to be responsive to an ever-more-rich donor class, puts the conservative movement in danger of rationalizing all the work the movement and the government does in the economic interests of their elite clients, and de-rationalizing any work it might do in the economic interests of workers. Such a course is a sure way of delegitimizing the state and the American political class.

It is true that I manifestly do not have the answers yet, nor do I believe Donald Trump has them. My aim in trying to understand and explain Trumpism and generate sympathy for the people who find themselves supporting Donald Trump is not to ratify dependency or a sense of victimhood in working-class people; it’s to slap conservatives out of a torpor, to tell them that they are not victims of this Trump-led populist revolt, but the authors of it. And to warn them that they make Trumpism inevitable by enabling the American elite and the political class in its cultural and economic secession from the rest of the American nation.

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116 Responses to A Letter From Trump’s America

Eamus seems to have missed out on the difference between democracy and republic, as well as the efforts of various political currents in the United States to formulate a workable hybrid. Literally speaking, democracy means the people vote on everything. Literally speaking a republic means the government is elected by some process, and then those elected rule — whatever the process may be. In both, the result can be menacing riots, either the pressure the elected leadership or to swing the democratic vote (read up on when the Cossacks were self-governing communities).

Viking is correct that the superdelegates are an “undemocratic” feature of Democratic national convention process.

Eamus seems to have missed out on the difference between democracy and republic, as well as the efforts of various political currents in the United States to formulate a workable hybrid.

No, I’m well aware of it, but thanks for your help.

Viking is correct that the superdelegates are an “undemocratic” feature of Democratic national convention process.

That’s right, they’re internally undemocratic, but one small feature aimed at helping make parties what they are, which in turn serves democracy. Democracy requires that the citizens have a choice, and parties are the mechanisms that modern democracies have developed to provide this choice. They allow citizens with similar views to cluster together and “petition the government” by putting forward their proposed agendas and candidates for office. This is democratic inasmuch as the public at large then gets to choose between clear alternatives.

But — to condense what I said at more length in the lost comment — parties can do this only if they aren’t all the same. They need to be what the name implies, a distinct “part” of the citizenry with its own set of proposals, selected from all those possible and contrasting with the proposals of other parts.

Anyway, superdelegates will not decide the Dem nomination this year. They’re only about one-sixth of all the delegates, far too few to stand in the way of Bernie’s revolution even if they wanted to.

Good stuff as usual to ponder, thoughtfully presented by RD. Bit “off color” and I do like the illustration chosen for the Op-ed…

But a ginormous middle finger, would have been more accurate as to the sentiment of Trump’s America. As some of the content alluded to there are many of us who feel like we do not have a society worth saving…it’s time to make some noise!

There’s a column by Thomas Frank over at the Guardian, you could unplug the words “Democrat” and “liberal” and plug in “Republican” and “conservative” and it would essentially say the same things as the Michael Brendan Dougherty piece (I’m a fan of both writers).
I’ve tried to make the point with tea party types that the America they want is the New Deal. None of them are old enough to remember what the country was like before the Great Depression so why do they vote for politicians who want to destroy the last vestiges of the great America that FDR built?
What Trump is proving is what Samuel Francis said, that the labels “left” and “right” is just something used to divide us. There’s no difference between a neocon and a liberal interventionist, just as there’s no difference between an allegedly liberal Democratic party beholden to Wall Street and Silicon Valley and an allegedly conservative Republican party also beholden to Wall Street and Silicon
Valley. Most of us are hosed either way.
Your emailer stated that he was tired of “eight years of being put down, etc.” From where I sit it hasn’t been eight years, it’s closer to forty. When I lost my steelworker job because my employer took local tax breaks and used the money to buy and oil company, it was my fault. I was a whiner, all steelworkers were lazy, I needed to swallow the bitter medicine for the good of the country, vote with my feet.
Sure I could have walked out on my brand new mortgage, moved to Palo Alto and gone to work for Intel making chips, but of course those jobs are gone now, too.

Re: Literally speaking, democracy means the people vote on everything. Literally speaking a republic means the government is elected by some process, and then those elected rule

Not really. “Democracy” and “Republic” address different issues. “Republic” addresses the source of sovereignty: for a Republic it is vested in the people, whether they have a practical means of exercising it or not. A democracy does have structures for the people to exercise power– regardless of whether they are sovereign or not. The UK is not a Republic (it is formally a monarchy), but it is democratic. China is not democratic in the least, but it is a republic. The United States is both a republic and a democracy.

That’s right, they’re internally undemocratic, but one small feature aimed at helping make parties what they are, which in turn serves democracy.

No, that serves republican government, not democracy.

You’re right that parties should be free to be the organized expression of a part of the electorate… but that requires undoing the “Two Party System” enshrined at the turn of the last century when the Dems and the GOP decided it was more important to stop the People’s Party and the Socialist Party. Parties that are free to be voluntary associations cannot expect to be a tacit part of the framework of government itself.

Getting back to Trump… its hard to imagine that he can even keep the trains running on time. But that he could keep a band of thugs happy chanting “Donald! Donald! Donald!” at all his speeches, I can easily envision.

This may just be a subset of Trump fans, of course, but what I observe is that these people have shirked their cultural work and believe that Trump can somehow do it for them

What rubbish. The religious right foot soldiers who lined up behind Bush, then Huckabee, then Santorum, and today are split among Cruz, Carson, and Rubio, those are the ones who want a President to effect cultural change by the power of his presence. Do you ever listen to religious right people? I do (they’re at my church and in my wife’s family). They want a Prez who says “God” and “Christ” in public (ooh, the godless librul media don’t like that!), who prays and drops Bible quotes in public, who persuades young people to come back to church and quit living in sin with their S.O.’s, who puts godly people on that thar Supreme Court to ban abortion and gay marriage (not realizing that even a reversal of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell would not result in an automatic ban of anything).

Trump, understandably, does the least God-talking of any of the remaining Republican candidates (and less than most of the drop-outs). He proposes things, like them or not, that a President has the authority to do, or at least realistically attempt, or work with Congress to enact (banning certain categories of foreigners from gaining entry visas; negotiating better trade deals; getting a border wall built; recouping costs of said wall by, say, taxing monetary transfers to Mexico, or charging higher entry fees to Mexicans; not starting new Middle East wars; reforming the provision of veterans’ health care; etc etc).

And here is the essential blindness of the Trump supporter: a very significant segment of people who work in service positions are either Black, Latino, or single mothers. Do you feel like Trump and his supporters are appealing to them? So sure, Trumpism shorn of its “let’s put those folks back where they belong” elements could become an all-powerful force. However, Trumpism minus those elements is nothing but the Sanders campaign.

And yet Sanders is not an “all-powerful force,” in large part because he has (so far) not converted much of black and brown citizenry to his cause. (Latest South Carolina polls have him at a quarter to a third among blacks. Proof will be in the pudding on the 27th. Further proof will be in the pudding when Hispanic-heavy states vote.)

Moreover, I reiterate what I and other crime-thinkers have noted about the Sanders vision: it depends on a polity that looks like Vermont (and I don’t mean snow and maple trees), and a culture reminiscent of Sanders’ youth in evil dark ages midcentury America.

Sandersism shorn of its pretensions to celebrating diversity is basically the Trump campaign.

Why does this idea that Trump gets things done persist? It has been well established that he could have taken his inheritance and dumped it in a Vanguard account and ended up with the same amount of money he has now. The guy really isn’t a business genius. Marketing genius? Oh my, yes.

“What rubbish. The religious right foot soldiers who lined up behind Bush, then Huckabee, then Santorum, and today are split among Cruz, Carson, and Rubio, those are the ones who want a President to effect cultural change by the power of his presence. Do you ever listen to religious right people? I do (they’re at my church and in my wife’s family). They want a Prez who says “God” and “Christ” in public (ooh, the godless librul media don’t like that!), who prays and drops Bible quotes in public, who persuades young people to come back to church and quit living in sin with their S.O.’s, who puts godly people on that thar Supreme Court to ban abortion and gay marriage (not realizing that even a reversal of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell would not result in an automatic ban of anything).”

Do you remember how bent out of shape many evangelicals got over Jimmy Carter honest, Biblically correct answer about sin and temptation 40 years ago because it happened to be in Playboy magazine an Carter used the word “screw”? Well today, 40 years later, Jerry Falwell Jr. has just endorsed a man who will become the first President, if elected, to own a strip joint. There is no more “Religious Right”. It’s done. Finito.

“Keep it up, jack. I don’t post the name of the correspondent because obviously revealing his or her identity would lead to him or her being fired, and you use that as an excuse to dismiss the person’s point of view. And you bring race into it when you have no idea what the races of the people involved are (neither do I), and it doesn’t matter. Horrific behavior is horrific behavior. But having convinced yourself that this person probably doesn’t exist, and if he or she does, he or she is probably a white racist, and therefore dismissable, you are going to be mighty surprised when it all blows up. — RD]

Having gone to a University and lived in a state where something actually did “blow up” and killed someone (the 1970 bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin) because four person’s political views led them to violence, don’t presume to think I don’t know what I’m talking about. Five years ago there were 150,000 people in the state capitol square in Madison for and against the governor’s budget bill. No serious outbreak of violence took place even though emotions were running high. Do you think that’s a miracle? I don’t. I think it’s just how we are in this day and age: A lot of talk but very little action. Thank God for the internet.

We’re on the verge of war? Look at what happened in Oregon, where a group of people who really did want a fight with the Feds to spark your “war”, sized control of Federal land. What happened? The people the insurrectionists supposedly came to help wanted nothing to do with them. The larger community basically shunned them. Even the militia people were divided over tactics and whether this was a good idea to begin with. What happened? They’re all in jail and will be there for a while. Some revolt that was.

It should be pointed out that while the Trumpites may want to smash the political system, they still wish to do so through the ballot box, not the bullet. That the ballot box still has more credibility to people than an AK-47 tells me the idea that “war is coming” in my opinion is just nonsense.

That’s why I posted that excerpt from Reagan’s first inaugural address. Because it’s clearly obvious from reading your own posts and comments section to them what’s happened since then is the loss of faith in America, as Reagan put it “a shining city on a hill.” You wouldn’t be planning on a “Benedict Option” if you still believed in it. You and others wouldn’t be talking about wars and insurrections. Reagan certainly didn’t. All he cared about was just…America, pure and simple, regardless what it was or who was in it. Naive maybe but also very simple and clear, which probably also is why Trump is so popular.

As for race, well, let’s just put it this way: If the immigration question was about, as Pat Buchanan put it, assimilating a million Britons into Virginia, we would not be talking about it, would we? Especially when said immigrants are now in small towns and cities in working in food processing plants and on farms basically controlled by their employers for cheap wages and silence on their immigration status which ties back to everything economics. Part of Trump rhetoric rings true and you can find it right here at TAC. The other part and one which cannot be ignored or wished away, is a loss of cultural supremacy (and in more ways than race.) Well, y’all wanted cheap food, cheap gas and lower interest rates. Reap what you sow.

What’s striking about Trump’s support is how consistent it is across different demographic groups- he’s at 41% with ‘somewhat conservative’ voters, 40% with younger voters, 38% with men, 36% with self identified Republicans, 35% with Evangelicals, 35% with middle aged voters, 34% with non-Evangelicals, 31% with women, 30% with self identified independents, 30% with ‘very conservative’ voters, 30% with seniors, and 29% with moderates. He has a lead of some size within every single one of those groups, similar to what he was able to do in New Hampshire…

But yet I can understand it. The governing class seems disconnected from the people. The Upper Middle class looks down on the rest (and while I am a member of the upper middle class my parents were poor children of Italian immigrants and never let me forget that fact). A broad spectrum of society feels that their concerns are not being addressed by mainstream politicians (or just handled by being called a racist). So if no help from the mainstream, they will go far outside the mainstream. Hence Trump and Sanders.

I am sorry Rod, but I simply cannot let you claim farming for conservatives.

I grew up farming; I milked between 80 and 120 cows every day before I went to school, came home, did my homework, and milked those cows again. Weekends, I also did the milk dishes. Summers, I hayed.

I farm now; a small family garden. I hang with farmers; organic farmers and pot farmers (I don’t smoke), and fiber farmers. I’m a fiber artist, I design hand knits, I dye wool and alpaca and angora. I go to a knitting circle at an organic farm each week, the farm is owned by two women in their seventies who recently got married.

You can participate in farming and a back-to-nature lifestyle. You can read Wendell Berry and Joe Saletin (I might recommend some Eliot Coleman, too, for northern vegetable farmers.)

But this is not a conservative thing; it’s not a religious thing. It’s a human thing. No gods, not politics are required to want to eat good food, to grow your own food, to make your own clothing, to live close to the land.

That’s why I began reading your blog — the food posts. I wish you’d do more. It is pretty much the only common ground we have.